Earth: work, money and the body

The Suit of Pentacles

The suit of earth: money, work, health and home. Everything that has to actually hold weight.

About the pentacles

Pentacles are the earth suit, sometimes called Coins or Disks. They cover money, work, property, health, craft and the body: everything material, and everything that takes time.

Earth is slow, and the suit reads slowly. Its cards are about accumulation, maintenance and the unglamorous middle of things. The Eight is somebody practising the same skill for the thousandth time; the Three is a job done properly with other people; the Four is holding on past the point where holding on helps.

It is also the suit most likely to be under-read by people who find tarot interesting for spiritual reasons. A reading full of Pentacles is not a boring reading. It is usually the deck declining to be metaphorical about rent.

All 14 cards

Every card links to its full meaning: upright, reversed, love, career, money, spirituality, health, symbolism and history.

The same cards, read across the suits

All four Fives together, all four Queens together. This is the cut that makes forty numbered cards learnable.

Pentacles in a spread

Elemental dignity is the first thing a reader checks between two neighbouring cards, and it is computed on every reading here. Pentacles are Earth: work, money and the body.

A spread where this suit dominates is telling you the question is about its territory whatever you actually asked, and a spread with none of it at all is telling you something too.

The rest of the deck

Learning this properly

Reading every card page in one sitting is the slowest way to learn the deck. The course covers the structure first, which is what turns 78 things to memorise into four suits, ten numbers and twenty-two archetypes.

How the deck is structuredAll 78 card meanings

About the pentacles

Straight answers, without the mystique.

  • Pentacles are the earth suit: money, work, health, home, craft and the body. They describe what you are building and whether it will hold.

  • Earth. Pentacles are nourished by Water and temper Fire, and barely interact with Air at all.